Abstract

This essay examines traditional diagrams illustrating the mechanics of ocular perspective that Stevens evokes in the opening three stanzas of “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” Elements of perspective crop up spontaneously throughout Stevens’s poems, but in “To an Old Philosopher” he uses them with thorough deliberateness. Stevens has in mind the entire enterprise of perspective in its logical elements, its cognitive qualities, and its historical adoption by both specialized disciplines and everyday parlance. Understood by Stevens as an irreducible phenomenon grounded in the natural world, perspective enables Stevens to meditate on George Santayana’s neo-Platonic realm of essences; to erase modern day distinctions between reason and imagination; to propose the imagination’s primacy as a consolation for old age; and to ally poets with scientists as purveyors of truth.

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